Richard Burgon: I refer the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I was also a trade union lawyer for 10 years before being elected to Parliament.
This Bill comes in the context of an attack on the right to vote, an attack on the right to protest peacefully and, now, an attack on the democratic right to strike. I want to read out what Human Rights Watch said last week:
“In 2022, we saw the most significant assault on human rights protections… in decades”.
It went on to warn that
“fundamental and hard-won rights are being systematically dismantled.”
In the light of that, I want in the time I have to look at a few key provisions in the Bill, which is part and parcel of that authoritarian attack on our hard-won rights. The very first clause makes no bones about it. Clause 1 explicitly says that the Bill is about restricting
“the protection…to trade unions and employees in respect of strikes”.
Moving on to the schedule, it talks about the
“Power of Secretary of State to specify minimum service levels”.
The Bill does not specify what the minimum service levels should be, so we have to ask ourselves this question: do we think it is right to hand to the Secretary of State as an individual the power to make such decisions? What level of service requirement would be seen as going too far in the eyes of an anti-union, union-bashing, right-wing Conservative Secretary of State—40%, 60%, 85%, 90%—if there is some trouble in the Tory party, and they want to throw some red meat to their hard-right Back Benchers and party members? This should concern us all.
We then move on to the broad categories of the services covered. How will “education services” or “transport services” be interpreted? Very widely I expect. The Bill states that a work notice must
“identify the persons required to work during the strike and…specify the work required to be carried out”.
This is chilling authoritarianism. Workers who lawfully voted to strike will be ordered to go to work. That is chilling. Finally, work notices offer no protection if a union fails to take reasonable steps. That completely changes the role of trade unions. It is absolutely appalling. Trade union officials will be expected outside the workplace on picket lines, telling workers who voted lawfully to strike to go to work. That completely subverts and changes the role of trade unions and attacks them as institutions. This Bill is appalling—it needs to be dropped.